


don't be a stranger

by quadrille



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, The Hunger Games (Movies)
Genre: Character Study, Deleted Scenes, Developing Relationship, Eventual Romance, F/M, Non-Chronological, Post-Series, Pre-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-28
Updated: 2015-12-28
Packaged: 2018-05-06 13:03:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,601
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5418107
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quadrille/pseuds/quadrille
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She’s ripping back the sheets and he’s stinking and hungover and maybe even still-drunk. Daylight streams in through the windows. She's the only one who's seen the inside of his bedroom in months.</p>
            </blockquote>





	don't be a stranger

**Author's Note:**

  * For [nefelibata (somnambulism)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/somnambulism/gifts).



There’s a snowstorm raging outside the house, and the power flickers, quavers, and ripples, before finally going out.

“Ah, fuck,” Haymitch grumbles. At first, he readjusts the blankets, tucking them in at the edges to prevent any heat from slipping out—he doesn’t want to leave—but then he remembers what happens to a building without heat. Still remembers the ache and gnaw of hunger, and the risk of frostbite in his fingers. The memories are always there, lurking in wait for a misstep, a trip of the foot.

She goes darting out of the bed like a bolting deer, shivering, all thin sticks and bones. He follows suit to the stack of firewood in the corner (Peeta’s always been very conscientious about cutting enough for them, even when they don’t do it themselves). The man stoops over to heave the logs into the fireplace, muscles straining; he’s still strong, even after all this, even after going to seed.

* * *

Don’t be a stranger.

* * *

His house is empty. Nothing more than a skeleton framework in an empty village, just him, alone.

After the funeral, the teenaged victor was wild and unthinking and unsupervised. He trashed a few homes: there was shattered glass crunching underfoot, the imprint of his fist in a wall, furniture overturned, an animal roaring and roaring and pacing and feeling teeth sink in around his ankle like a trap. When he finally settled into one of the buildings, it was more from exhaustion than anything else.

* * *

Effie’s face is pressed against the cool glass, watching Peeta and Katniss work on the garden.

* * *

Everything is drab and grey and grey and grey, colourless, all the life and vim seeped out of the world like a slow-bleeding wound. Her clothes are grey, her last wig was lost on the airship, and even the food tastes like ash here in District Thirteen. Effie locks the door with shaking hands, shutting it behind her.

She misses perfumes. Bright colour. Delicate treats. Hot, hot showers and baths, the Avoxes scrubbing her down with a comforting touch, maternal almost, in lieu of a parent. The last time anyone touched her, properly, was eight months ago.

* * *

It's just him and her and the mayor on that stage. Haymitch stumbles in late as always, barely conscious.

She hisses out of the corner of her mouth, while Undersee rambles on. “Haymitch. _Where_ have you been?” she asks, though she knows already.

He grunts, doesn't answer. It’s a miracle he’s even standing.

* * *

She’s ripping back the sheets and he’s stinking and hungover and maybe even still-drunk. Daylight streams in through the windows. She's the only one who's seen the inside of his bedroom in months.

“Up, up up!” Effie trills, with a slight edge of hysteria to the cheeriness, mustering up the same energy she uses for the tributes. “It’s going to be a big, big, big day!”

“ _Fuck off,_ ” snarls the lump of blankets, and she dodges nimbly back from a swinging hand that could have been a fist. She’ll send the Avoxes to drag him into the shower later, and turn the water on him at full blast.

* * *

“Look, if you’d maybe just put a _little_ more effort to your appearance...” she starts, thinking _like you used to—_

But before she’s even gotten into full swing, the man has whirled to face her.

“Look, sweetheart,” Haymitch volleys back with bared teeth, his fingers tight around the glass (and she thinks for a moment how easily it could break—how it could snap in those clenched knuckles or he could slam it against the mahogany table and thus be armed with a shard of glass, because victors are, as a matter of fact, _killers_ ). “We’ve got absolutely nothing to do with each other. I don’t owe you anything. I’m the only one who can sign the sponsorship deals, while you just need to fold their goddamn napkins or… or whatever the fuck it is you do. So how about you just go back to reading your Capitol magazines and I’ll be over here working for my district? _Alone._ ”

It’s like the snapping jaws of a wounded animal. He stresses the word _my_ : his territory and ownership, the lines between them. Effie’s painted lips firm into a thin line.

* * *

The escort stares in the mirror, readjusts her wig, curls her eyelashes one more time. A daub of powder on her cheeks. Gold-rimmed eyes, like winking jewels. She takes a deep breath, feeling her lungs cinch in the corset, her weight balanced on those towering heels. She’ll be back in the districts tomorrow.

(Effie Trinket loves her job but has grown to hate her job. She does not miss the districts, with their grubby citizens and dusty coal-thick air and dismal buildings and sunken-eyed people.)

Breathe.

It’s starting up again.

The machine is hungry.

And she needs to feed it.

* * *

The first time he finds her crying (and _properly crying_ , not one of those artful sniffs she’s mastered on the stage), Effie is staring down at her clipboard with a tremor in her voice.

“Nero pulled out of the sponsorship,” Effie says feebly—although it’s not like he cares, she reminds herself. Haymitch Abernathy stopped giving a damn about the sponsors years ago, before she even showed up in this district; it’s all she can do to even make him show up to mandatory events.

But she feels it like another gouge in her heart, another personal failure, as they watch a sweet twelve-year-old dying on the screen. His wound has festered, infected and rotten. Dead flesh withering on the vine. Meanwhile, the careers have no end of medicine.

Tears are rolling down her cheeks, smudging the meticulously applied makeup, streaking her mascara.

Haymitch’s heavy hand rests on her shoulder for once. Effie wonders if he’s about to offer some comfort, some sort of gruff manly consolation in his own peculiar—

“We’re out of Lux whisky,” he says curtly instead, and leaves.

* * *

She’s stripping back the blankets ( _up up up up_ ). But the man is curled in on himself, sweating into damp sheets, his hair slicked to his temple, hands shaking and quavering.

DT. Delirium tremens. Detoxification.

Effie hasn’t touched a drop of alcohol herself since he started sobering up, either; she wonders if he’s noticed, but shoves that thought aside as she snaps her fingers, crisply, for the Avoxes to appear.

* * *

In his opinion, she’s never prettier than when she’s wearing one of his shirts and nothing else: hem drifting somewhere around her thighs, revealing the curve of bare ass. No makeup. No heels.

She could almost be a district girl, he thinks: scrubbed clean and plain and warming his bed.

(Except for the way she moves: all delicate mincing steps and grace, smooth movements as if she’s dancing.)

[And except for those rare mornings when Effie happens to wake up grumpy rather than pathologically cheery: knuckles gritted white around the handle of her coffee mug, muttering profanities under her breath, which is also his favourite.]

* * *

“Don’t be a stranger, Effie,” he murmurs into her hair, then presses a kiss to her cheek, then her lips. And as Effie watches the pair of them walk away from her, she feels her entire body contort and shudder with a sob, fist pressed against her mouth. She’s happy. They won. Isn’t she happy?

When he kissed her, it felt matter-of-fact. Gentle, and not surprising at all, just as if she’d pencilled him into her calendar and it was finally time: _of course, of course_ , of course they would.

* * *

A year later, at what would have been the normal appointed time of the Games, as steady as clockwork, as if Effie Trinket is patently incapable of deviating from her schedule, she's on his doorstep again with packed bags.

* * *

Everything is colourless in District Thirteen, and the only thing that feels fully alive is him.

(The Mockingjay, too, of course, but Katniss has become aloof. Distant. Untouchable. People tend to shy away from her, with the awe and reverence accorded to a symbol rather than a girl—Effie, for her part, isn’t intimidated. She still remembers this child when she had to be taught how to walk in a dress and how to hold a salad fork.

Miss Everdeen has come a terribly long way since then.)

But still. The military regimen doesn’t sit right with Effie, everyone blending into one indistinguishable uniform mass. Meanwhile, Haymitch is talking up a storm with soldiers at the breakfast table. When he laughs, it's a deep belly chuckle, his words sharp and unimpressed. It’s so much better than the listlessness that once dogged him, she thinks. He’s alive now.

Hours later, she’s perching delicately on the edge of his bed. There are no windows underground, no glass to let in streaming daylight.

“Why are you here, Effie?” the man asks blearily. He considers one option, for a moment, but—

_I don’t know. I don’t know._

They don’t speak; he doesn’t touch her; they sit like that until she feels like she can breathe again, and leaves.

* * *

He’s rebuilding himself one day at a time, and so is she.

* * *

She knocks lightly at his door on the train, her forehead pressed against the wood.

“Haymitch—”

After a pause, knowing they’re already _nine minutes late_ and assuming he’s out cold, Effie opens the door (what are locks, what are privacy, these uncivilised district people don’t merit it)—and a knife is suddenly quivering in the door beside her and she draws back as if she’s been scalded.

And with it, the sudden sting of pain. A trickle of blood on her arm. She touches it, her powder-white fingertip coming away wet and red, and she stares at it, fascinated.

* * *

Her fingernails are digging into the bare skin of his back, drawing lines and a hiss from the victor’s throat. When she kisses him, she nips sharply at his lip, and Haymitch laughs. She can feel the rumble of amusement going right through him, and thus right through her.

“Had no idea this is what you were into, sweetheart.”

She draws back: slightly flustered, her cheeks hot. Effie can primp and preen and enjoy the innumerable cameras on her during the Games, but there’s something so much more cutting and incisive about his eyes on her naked skin.

* * *

She was young when he won, but later, as a teenager, she watches and rewatches the footage from the Quarter Quell. The way the handsome older victor looks up into the camera, as if he can _tell_ it’s there, and he looks right at them—at her, into her, seeing her, and there’s that curl of a cocky grin at the corner of his mouth, and she decides that this one was her favourite.

* * *

Over a decade later, he’s not what she expected: slumped in his chair, eyes heavy-lidded, barely even aware of what’s going on around him.

Effie Trinket tries to make conversation, just as she’s been taught to do.

“So, do you have a sweetheart back home? Someone to watch you and the children on the screens?” she asks politely, already considering how to spin it to the party-guests. (There’s been very little Capitol coverage about Haymitch Abernathy lately; it doesn’t seem normal.)

The man laughs then, a scoffing scornful sound, dismissive. He looks away from her, taking no notice, instead turning back to the glass of amber liquid rolling back and forth in his hand.

* * *

There’s just water in his glass, and his hand is trembling. Normally so sure and steady, he can hit a door with a knife from fifteen feet away—now he can’t even take a drink without spilling. Haymitch lets out a frustrated noise, a huff of breath, a snarl like a wild animal.

Effie is tempted to reach out and pat that hand, offering what comfort she can, but she doesn’t.

* * *

They’re a common pair at these events by now, but he only touches her when he’s practically pissing himself drunk. The way he tries to hug her on-stage, in front of all those grim-eyed district people and the cameras and the Peacekeepers, his grimy hands on her pristine dress, his reeking breath in her ear and knocking her wig askew. She recoils and studiously ignores him for the rest of the ceremony (this was _her_ time and _her_ event, and now he’s gone and _ruined_ it and her wig looks terrible).

He’s a work-in-progress. But Effie Trinket is better than this, and she knows she can turn this situation around. She’ll be out of this district within a couple years, just you wait.

* * *

How did Euphemia Trinket, Capitol escort, end up a member of the rebellion? She’s not even sure.

But this much she can do: marketing, presentation, the promos and propos. Plutarch Heavensbee is one of theirs, and he speaks a language she understands. She can see those gears turning and turning in his head, like a cunning calculating spider.

She doesn’t really care about the politics so much, but Effie does know this: she knows that Peeta Mellark wipes his hands carefully after every meal, and that he makes a wonderful loaf of homemade bread, and Katniss Everdeen gave a heartfelt apology to her when she didn’t have to, and tried to do everything she could to keep her partner alive, and perhaps the children aren’t fiancees after all but Effie does love this motley little group. In her time with them, they’ve already shown her more genuine warmth than thirty years of Capitol friends.

And she knows—though they try to keep it from her—the lengths and arguments Haymitch and Plutarch went to, grappling with their own president over Effie Trinket’s miserable little life.

And that gratitude runs bone-deep.

* * *

Haymitch Abernathy is being surly and uncooperative as usual, but she grabs fistfuls of blond hair regardless and shears through it with the scissors (he wouldn’t let the Avoxes near him, but he can _not_ go on camera like this, he looks like an unkempt bear).

“You look terrible,” she says sharply.

“Did I?” A dry response. “Hadn’t noticed.” He’s hunkered down in that chair, stolid and unmoving, resigned to his fate. Effie is a _very_ deft hand at haircuts; she’s no stylist, but couture runs in her blood and she knows the sort of cut to flatter his broad, strong-jawed face. (When her hands curl over the plane of his cheeks, she remembers, vaguely, a sixteen-year-old on the screens and a smirk.)

“If you were intending to look like a shaggy carpet, Haymitch, you succeeded.” Locks of hair drift down to the clean white tile floor.

She doesn’t remember until later that he never lets anyone near him with a sharp object, and that he’s decked other Capitolites for less at the dinner table.

* * *

She leans over and presses a kiss to the top of his head, brushing off the finishing touches on his quarterly haircut. Haymitch leans into her side, his hand steadying against her for a moment.

Then his hand drifts, starting to creep up under the edge of her skirt, and Effie swats it away.

“Shush. There’s not enough time.” She isn’t carrying a clipboard anymore, but she’s still compulsively punctual as always, a clock practically written on her eyelids. “It’s Memorial Day, and we need to be out in the square with President Paylor in fifteen minutes.”

* * *

It’s another party for another set of sponsors, the 80” TVs arranged all around the edges of the rooms and suspended in midair, showing live footage nonstop. There is no such thing as a break from the Games. She lives it, breathes it, thinks it, even as she’s swanning around the room with finely-made cocktails.

Haymitch is in the middle of a group of men, and she can recognise that telltale stiffness to his back, that twitch in his jaw and hand that means he’s angry. He’s going to start punching someone if someone else doesn't intervene. She’s seen it before; they’ve been thrown out of these parties and then she's shouted at him, shrill like an angry lap dog, but he’s just laughed it off and never paid attention to her because no one pays attention to Effie Trinket, ever.

The woman steps in smoothly then, right before the tension and violence is about to snap, her arm linking in Haymitch’s without pause. It steadies him. His posture straightens, where he was wavering before, the alcohol setting him off balance and off-kilter and askew, on the verge of stumbling. He leans in a little. Just for balance.

“I’m _ever_ so sorry, Gaius, but I have to steal the victor for a moment. I need him.” Effie flashes a dazzling smile, one of her best.

“I don’t—” Haymitch starts, but then she escorts him over to the buffet table instead, because that's her job, isn’t it?

* * *

“Effie, c’mon. Come out.”

“ _No_ ,” she says miserably, piteously, curled in on herself under the covers. A ragged headband is tied around her too-short hair. Her shirt is tied in at her waist, in an attempt to make the outline more flattering. She’s scrutinised the effect in the mirror, clinical and assessing like a doctor sizing up a tumor, until she dissolved into tears and buried herself under the pillow. Hysterical gulps, a shudder in her breath.

“I have a bottle with your name on it.”

After a pause, she does peer out from under the pillow a little.

Fifteen minutes later, the door is unlocked and she’s scooted back against the wall with her legs curled up under her, nursing a glass despondently against her knee. Taking another sip, Effie sighs. “I can see why you drink this,” she says.

It doesn’t make things _better_. But it does, for a moment, make them just barely tolerable.

That’s about all they can hope for.

It’s also the last bottle he has down here, underground in District Thirteen, and Effie knows there’s going to be another withdrawal period and they aren’t going to be as well-equipped to deal with it this time. He fell off the wagon before, but the third time’s the charm.

This one’s going to _have_ to stick, anyway. This is a dry district if ever she saw one.

* * *

In the darkness, with the Capitol’s bombs hammering down on them again and again and again and again, the plaster raining from the ceiling and her heart hammering in her throat with panic (she was _never_ supposed to be in danger; that was the tributes’ job, for goodness sake), she’s as surprised as anyone when her hand snakes into his (big and strong and comforting), and even more surprised when he squeezes it back.

* * *

Haymitch falls asleep sitting up, his head tipped back against the concrete wall. He can sleep anywhere. She once found him passed out on the floor of a shower stall, with nothing but cold tile for a pillow.

And though the princess on the pea always thought she needed feather-soft mattresses and down comforters, apparently she doesn’t.

She dozes off sprawled in his lap, a pillow on his knees, her head resting against it. Haymitch’s arm not quite touching her, careful to maintain an inch of distance. But still, there’s that weight against his legs, and Effie can feel the warmth of him beside her, and that’s how she finally falls asleep.

* * *

Even after so many years, he’s still a solid wall of muscle (though gone softer with age and alcohol), and when she slams her hand into his chest, he doesn’t move.

He doesn’t laugh this time, either, which almost makes her feel like crying.

“You cannot let this one die,” she says, furious. ( _I volunteer as tribute_. Effie’s own eyes had glazed over, operating almost on autopilot, going through the rote motions and only able to summon up some sort of stale excitement even as she daydreamed of being assigned to a better district—until Katniss. This one is different. Even she can tell.)

“What do you think I’m trying to do?” Haymitch growls. But it’s still more fight than she's seen out of him in years.

* * *

Against all expectations: they’re alive, they’re alive, they’re alive. _Both_ of them. Effie is staring in mollified shock at the screen, an entire hushed room around her—Cinna looks strangely satisfied, even smug. As if he knew all along, as if he’d had no doubts.

Effie, she’s nothing but doubts. And when she instinctively looks over at Haymitch, she realises that part of him can’t believe it either.

She’s been working for years and never ever ever had a win.

Let alone two at once.

Is that even allowed?

“Are they… allowed to do that?” Effie asks, and Haymitch starts laughing and laughing and swallows the rest of his drink. But there's a fierce grin on his face now.

She can feel the bedrock shifting beneath her.

* * *

The rebellion and the war are over and they’re alive.

* * *

Don’t be a stranger.

* * *

A year after the end of the war, she’s standing on his doorstep in four-inch heels and a trim burgundy coat, and with a stack of impractical suitcases beside her. (Though they’re all packed efficiently, without a whisper of space gone unused—because despite everything, Effie grew used to living on less.) They eye each other across that distance.

Then, making a decision and flinging her too-small handbag down into the snow, Effie is closing that distance and heaving herself into Haymitch’s arms, strong and comforting and alive. And she's kissing him and kissing him, and she found that she did miss the districts after all.


End file.
